1. Technical Field
The present invention relates an ink jet recording medium which is used for aqueous pigment inks, which is highly transparent, and which has the ability to express a wide range of gloss and/or whiteness. The ink jet recording media is suitable for, for example, proofing.
2. Related Art
Ink jet recording methods are used to record images in such a manner that fine droplets of inks are ejected by various operating principles so as to be applied to recording media such as paper sheets or films. Images formed by the ink jet recording methods have increased resolution and color reproducibility and therefore, in recent years, have been increasingly demanded for design applications, such as posters, displays, leaflets, and package proofs, needed to have high color developability and reproducibility. For package proofing applications, for example, color samples adjusted in light of gloss properties of package materials are required.
In order to accurately reproduce the difference in gloss between package materials, the ability to reproduce a wide range of gloss including high luster like metallic luster and substantially no luster like a matted material is required.
There has been no ink jet recording medium capable of completely coping with such a requirement. In order to exhibit high gloss, a metal layer is placed on a side of a transparent support and an ink-receiving layer is placed on another side thereof as disclosed in, for example, Japanese Patent No. 3372709 (Patent Document 1). High gloss can be exhibited by this technique; however, it is difficult to reduce gloss by this technique. That is, it is difficult for ink jet recording media including metal layers to express the texture of low-gloss materials such as matted materials.
Therefore, in the case of expressing a matte texture using a film including a metal layer disposed on a surface of a base member of an ink jet recording medium, the base member is made cloudy so as to have reduced gloss in such a manner that a surface of the base member that is opposite to the metal layer is physically matted by sandblasting as disclosed in, for example, JP-A-7-34227 (Patent Document 2). In any way, in order to cope with needs for ink jet recording media having various glossy textures, a plurality of recording media need to be prepared. There has been no ink jet recording medium capable of being adjusted in glossiness by the amount of applied ink.